The Visitor

Notes

In 2372 the Bajoran wormhole underwent an inversion, a phenomenon which occurs only once every fifty years. Captain Sisko took the defiant to observe the event. During the trip an emergency situation arose when the Defiant's warp core went critical. Captain Sisko and his son Jake were hit by an energy discharge which resulted in the elder Sisko apparently being killed.

Jake was devastated by the loss of his father, and over the next year he drifted through life on Deep Space Nine. The political situation on the station gradually worsened; the Bajorans regarded the loss of the Emissary of the Prophets as a clear sign that the Federation would be unable to defend the station, and with the Klingons becoming more and more belligerent it seemed that their time on the station was limited.

Months after the accident, Jake saw his father appear briefly in his room before vanishing again. Jake thought he was having a dream, but some months later he again saw his father. This time he was able to talk to and touch him, and immediately called for the station crew. Captain Sisko was taken to the infirmary, where it was found that his temporal signature had been changed by the accident. Unfortunately, Sisko once again vanished despite all attempts to prevent it.

Despite months of effort, DS9's officers were completely unable to locate their Captain. With the political situation on DS9 now untenable, the Federation ceded the station to the Klingons. Jake returned to Earth where he became a writer and started a family of his own. Then, some twenty years after the original accident, his father appeared again. Overcome with guilt at not being able to help his father, Jake became totally obsessed with finding a way to recover him. He abandoned his writing to study subspace physics, determined to find out what was happening. In the process he became more distant from his wife, and they eventually separated. Jake spent decades working on his theories, and eventually determined that he might be able to recover his father at the next wormhole inversion. Gathering the original Defiant crew, Jake returned to the wormhole after Worf managed to gain permission from the Klingons. Unfortunately the attempt was unsuccessful and Jake was only able to spend a few minutes with his father. Captain Sisko was distraught that Jake had wasted so much time, and begged him to rebuild his life.

Decades later Jake - now an old man - was visited by a young woman in the night. She was an aspiring writer who had found his two books deeply moving, and wanted to ask him why he had never written more. Slowly Jake told her the sad story of his life, revealing that he had returned to his writing after failing to recover his father. He presented her with the original draft of the book, and revealed that he had finally found a way to save his father. The accident attached the two of them, and as they grew further apart in time the 'cord' between them would occasionally grow tight, yanking his father back to him again. Jake claimed that if he cut the cord whilst they were together, his father would be returned to the time and place of the original accident.

After the visitor had departed Captain Sisko arrived once more. Initially delighted to learn that Jake had taken up writing again, he was stunned to learn that the only way to cut the cord between them was for Jake to take his own life whilst they are together. Jake, already having poisoned himself, died in his fathers arm's.

Captain Sisko was instantly returned to the original accident, where he safely dodged the energy blast. With this act the alternate timeline created by his death was eliminated, and he once again began to live out his life with the son who needed him so very much.1